Vote for Who Gets $10 Million for Green Tech

Want to help decide who gets $25,000 for a crazy green contest idea? And even cooler, do you want to help decide what the next X-Prize competition will be?

Well grab a bowl of organic popcorn and get ready to decide someone's fate.

The latest X-Prize competition is a video competition for figuring out the next X-Prize competition. Weird, I know, but so fun. It's based on green thinking, and the person who comes up with the coolest idea for a green idea contest will get a lot of money. The winner is decided, in part, by video votes. Which means your opinion is needed. But the deadline is nearly upon us so get crackin'!

Read on for the three videos judges have decided are worth your vote, and more info on where to go to put in your two cents. The contestant who gets the most votes receives $25,000 and will have a shot at $10 million offered for the next X-Prize.

The three ideas are:

An Energy Independence X-Prize

Alan Silva of Roy in Utah's idea is a challenge to make an affordable off-grid house - one that does not rely on fossil fuels or centralised energy distributors. His example includes solar panels and wind turbines on the roof, underground heat exchangers and flywheels to store energy.

Reduce Home Energy Use

Jonathan Dreher of Cambridge, Massachusetts…Reducing demand by finding ways of using less energy is the simplest climate change solution, but is very often ignored in favour of fancy new technologies and more politically palatable options. Dreher's idea is to offer the $10m prize to the community that manages to reduce its energy usage by the largest amount in two years. That might be all the homes within a zip code area or a school district. Only one community wins the prize, but the benefit is much greater because of the reductions in energy usage by others.

The Capacitor Challenge

Kyle Good of Irvine, California, and a couple of his mates think the $10m prize would be better spent stimulating research into alternatives to battery power…Good's prize would reward new portable power supplies based on capacitors - or as the video rather dramatically puts it, the ultracapacitor. The team set out a suite of technical requirements and stipulate that the device must power an electric car for 100 miles without recharging.

Vote for the idea you like best at the X-Prize Foundation. It takes about 6 minutes of watching, and 6 seconds of clicking to decide a big fate for someone.